All is not well in Lee’s ‘Red Island House’ paradise
Andrea Lee’s lush, perceptive novel “Red Island House” (Scribner, 288 pp., eeeg) is her first since 2006’s “Lost Hearts in Italy,” and it’s clear the time was well and carefully spent.
The novel is a set of connected stories focused on Shay, an Oakland, California-bred Black literary scholar who falls for Senna, a wealthy Italian merchant who has built his dream manor in Madagascar. The Red House, like the entire island, is seductive, and Lee describes it exquisitely. Arriving there on vacations from Italy, Shay feels “the first caress of tropical air like an infant’s hand on the face.”
That caress is deceptive, though, and Lee is alert to the power imbalance that Senna and Shay’s presence represents, “First World money in a Third World Country, one of the poorest on Earth.” One person’s paradise is built on somebody else’s back.
Shay first witnesses that imbalance through the native housekeeper who insists that a folk ritual and a traditional housewarming party (zebu sacrifice and all) will resolve the theft and wastefulness around the Red House. The crisis is exacerbated by a European house manager, and Shay sees old colonialist tropes recycling. Senna, oblivious, delivers an ugly response to Shay’s efforts to step in: “Do you know how hard it is to find a white man to run things in Africa?”
Throughout the novel, Lee offers snapshots of rivalries and conflicts within and across cultures on the island. A pair of rival club owners shed light on the pecking order among local women; a squabble between two aging Italian men over a Malagasy woman
satirizes their machismo. As the novel follows Shay and Senna’s marriage across multiple decades, Shay grows wiser about the place but also feels increasingly implicated in its exploitation, and burdened by the emotional labor she’s asked to do to put things right.
“She is automatically adjudged the kind of woman who ... is devoted to keeping social, racial, tribal, and sexual hierarchies in place,” Lee writes. If a French visitor stays at the Red House with a young woman who is effectively a prostitute, should Shay intervene or speak up? Every option seems determined to exclude the woman, who, ironically, “is the only one of them on native soil.”
“Red Island House” is in league with other major novels that use far-flung locales to explore cultural asymmetry and racism, such as Toni Morrison’s “Tar Baby” and Norman Rush’s “Mating.” And as in those books, Lee celebrates what distinguishes her setting – her descriptions of Madagascar are rich and deep. But she doesn’t succumb to the exoticism that makes the country feel “ornamental and harmless,” as Shay puts it.
For a time, Shay and Senna’s marriage feels like an underdrawn element of the book – why stay in a marriage so suffused with anxiety, ignorance, and bigotry? But the closing pages explore that dynamic so well that “Red Island House” becomes a unique, surprising work – at once a psychological novel, a novel of place and a novel about relationships.
“You can’t just come into a country, build a big house, and take what you want,” Lee observes. “The land you set out to plunder ends by plundering you.” Her novel is a savvy exploration of the many ways that plundering is done.